.." Each woman's attitude toward life reverses upon learning the news. Mrs. Mallard goes from depression and wishing to die to happiness and hoping for a long life. "Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days...would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long." Mrs. Hutchinson goes from liking her neighbors and chatting cheerfully with the other women to fear of them and desperate pleas. "I tell you it wasn't fair. You didn't give him time enough to choose. Everybody saw that."

Mrs. Mallard dies from a heart attack and the shock of seeing her husband alive instead of dead. "When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease -- of joy that kills." Of course, this is literary irony because the reader knows it wasn't joy.
Mrs. Hutchinson's neighbors and her own family stone her to death for the sake of tradition. "The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles."

Both women might have escaped if they had been willing to stand up and be different.